Remains
by Orm
Summary: Sasori left backup. Deidara isn't quite sure what to do with it. Sort of SasoDei if you squint, sort of not SasoDei if you squint the other way.


_Kinda SasoDei if you squint and kinda not SasoDei if you squint the other way. It doesn't really matter. Written 'cause I occasionally need to remind myself why I draw and don't write._

_This is most irregular. Don't expect any more out of me any time soon._

•

Deidara finds the second tube when he's clearing Sasori's things out at base.

Sasori has – had – a lot more than Deidara knows anyone else in the Akatsuki does. (Or assumes anyone else does – he's never seen the quarters of most of the other members, but he finds it difficult to imagine Kisame, for instance, keeping much here.) There's a lot of bits and pieces; finished things and broken things and things that are as good as broken now their creator is dead.

Deidara burns them. He drags every last puppet outside and puts them in a heap and sets them alight and watches them burn.

He thinks perhaps that it ought to seem like they're watching him, that the wooden mouths hanging open are screaming. It doesn't. More than ever they just seem dead. Perhaps that's why the one thing with anything like life left in it suddenly catches Deidara's eye, nestled at the edge of the bonfire, and on an impulse he goes forward to pick it up. He can hold it in one hand, and the chakra off it is stifling for something this small.

He knows what it is, of course, and he isn't in the slightest surprised. Why _wouldn't_ Sasori keep backup? Immortality couldn't afford the arrogance of thinking he'd never need it.

Deidara weighs it in his hand. Sasori's time is done, his life at last lent some beauty by the irony of his death. Deidara's not going to bring back something like that – not going to give Sasori the damn' _satisfaction_.

But he doesn't throw it on the bonfire to burn with the dead things. He slips it into the pouch with the clay, and pretends to forget about it.

It's still in there two months later, when he's surveying the broken landscape where Sasori fell.

There ...

Deidara thinks he can feel something pulse in his clay-pouch, but it's as _he_ catches sight of the thing that was Sasori, and he knows that makes no sense.

It might be his own heart.

There are puppets everywhere, like war dead, but bent all wrong and some creaking when the wind is strong. Some of them he distantly recognises. Some of them are unfamiliar, like the ones that lie either side of the one he's looking for. He shoves them aside with his foot, and pulls the swords out of Sasori's dead back, and uses one of them to roll Sasori over.

Deidara is surprised to see a trickle of blood from Sasori's mouth, dried and old and black, until he realises it could just as well be oil. He isn't sure which would be more depressing.

Sasori's face has been weathered by nature, which on its own is almost enough to make Deidara want to bring him back to life, just to see his reaction to it – but then he thinks of Sasori's smug, triumphant smile, _I told you so_, and frowns as he finds himself wanting to see it, any familiar expression on this dead cracked face except the almost alarming look of shock that widens the dead eyes. Deidara doesn't think he ever saw Sasori look so surprised at anything.

He's holding it again, he realises, he's taken it out of the pouch and he's holding it, turning it over in his hands. It's identical to the one in Sasori's chest, except for the utter lack of any life. Deidara can feel the difference from here – behind the cut kanji and the blood-or-oil, there might as well be no more than wood and metal and mechanisms; the chakra residue is barely any more than the strings leave on any of the regular puppets.

He nudges Sasori's head with his foot. It doesn't even slump to one side – the neck must need oiling – just rocks slightly. Dead. "Did you get it, then?" he says, angrily. "Eternity's _death_, yeah. Stupid – you can't ..."

Deidara throws the little container of remnants of humanity to the ground, not forcefully, but finally. He doesn't see it bounce or roll; he's turned before it hits the rocks, walking briskly away through the artificial corpses.

It comes to rest against Sasori's face, whose startled dead eyes stare unseeing out at Deidara's rapidly retreating back. The face hasn't deteriorated with decay. The expression is held exactly. One instant, frozen for eternity.


End file.
